Oxford University Press (OUP) was again named Publisher and Distributor of the Year at a Booksellers Association award ceremony on Wednesday 14 March.

It was the seventh time in eight years that OUP collected the Publisher of the Year award, and the eighth year in a row that it has won the Distributor of the Year prize at the Conference for Academic, Professional & Specialist Booksellers Awards Ceremony.

The awards are judged by booksellers and Bookseller Association members working in the UK who score publishers throughout the year.

Categories focus specifically on the services being offered to booksellers by publishers such as engagement with bookshops, support from central or head office services, delivery turnaround times, and publishing.

OUP staff were particularly pleased with the Distributor of the Year Award, which came just a over a year after the relocation of its UK Distribution Centre to new premises in Kettering.

Andrea Wood, Head of Customer Services at Kettering, said: “Although we have seen success at this ceremony for several years now, it is certainly not something we take for granted. It is a tremendous honour to receive such on-going support from across the industry, and we are all delighted with the result.”

Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, said of the recommendations in the report: “This is a complete no-brainer. This is scholarly research funded from the public purse, largely from taxpayer and philanthropic organisations. The taxpayer has the right to have maximum benefit extracted and that will only happen if there is maximum access to it.”

Text mining draws on data analysis techniques such as natural language processing and information extraction to find new knowledge and meaningful patterns within large collections.

Torsten Reimer, JISC programme manager, explains, “Text mining is already producing efficiencies and new knowledge in areas as diverse as biological science, particle physics, media and communications. It has been used to hypothesise the causes of rare diseases and how pre-existing drugs could be used to target different diseases.

“The technique was also used recently to analyse the vast amount of text produced on websites, blogs and social media such as Twitter – where copyright holders allowed – and showed that the messages exchanged on Twitter during the English riots of 2011 were not to blame for inciting riots,” added Torsten.

The business benefit of text mining is in identifying emerging trends, and to explore consumer preferences and competitor developments. Text mining is particularly used in larger companies as part of their customer relationship management strategy and in the pharmaceutical industry as part of their research and development strategy.

The report shows that such techniques could enable researchers in UK universities to gain new knowledge that would otherwise remain undiscovered because there is just too much relevant literature for any one person to read. Such discoveries could lead to benefits for society and the economy.

The UK has a number of strengths that put it in a good position to be a key player in text mining development, such as the existence of good framework conditions for innovation and the natural advantage of its native language.

Professor Douglas Kell, chief executive of the BBSRC, says, “This report shows the importance of implementing the recommendations of the Hargreaves Review  as current copyright law is also imposing restrictions, since text mining involves a range of computerised analytical processes which are not all readily permitted within UK intellectual property law. In order to be ‘mined’, text must be accessed, copied, analysed, annotated and related to existing information and understanding.  Even if the user has access rights to the material, making annotated copies can be illegal under current copyright law without the permission of the copyright holder.

“The report also shows that text mining can add enormous value to the benefit of the UK economy, as long as the text is freely available and unencumbered. Otherwise there is a real risk that we will miss discoveries that could have significant social and economic impact.”

Torsten added, “These laws are inhibiting text mining’s wider usage and making academic institutions nervous of taking it up. Without wider usage, the potential for text mining to generate gains for the economy and society cannot be exploited and the UK economy will be less able to take advantage of its strong public research base. There is a danger that the UK may be left behind as other countries such as Japan adopt a more liberal approach that encourages text mining usage.”

The report identifies a number of barriers that we need to overcome to make best use of text mining tools in the future.  Firstly, text mining is a complex technical process that requires skilled staff; secondly it requires unrestricted access to information sources; thirdly copyright can be a barrier.

The report authors conclude that more work needs to be undertaken to raise awareness of the potential benefits and value of text mining to UK further and higher education.

An event at the Wellcome Trust last night started the process of looking at how publishers, researchers and policy makers can make this happen.

Read the report

The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters today announced the launch of its 2012 Academic Reputation Survey, for a current evaluation of higher education institutions globally. This is the third consecutive year the reputation survey has been conducted.

The survey, which is sent to over 200,000 academics and researchers around the world, engages professional scholars to obtain a more accurate assessment of the institutional landscape. Survey respondents are asked which institutions they consider the best in terms of research, teaching and other factors, such as geographical region. These assessments are combined with other key variables to create a comprehensive profile for each institution.

From the start of the survey until its close in late April, respondents will have the opportunity to answer questions in six subject areas: engineering and technology; physical sciences; life sciences; clinical, preclinical and health; social sciences; and arts and humanities.

To help control for language and translation bias, the Academic Reputation Survey is offered in nine languages: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, English, French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Spanish.

“We are very pleased with the increasing numbers of participants from all over the world and expect even more this year,” said Simon Pratt, product manager at Thomson Reuters. “ Thomson Reuters will continue to offer academics and researchers the opportunity to highlight what they believe to be the strongest universities in their specific fields, both in teaching and research.”

The survey forms an important part of Thomson Reuters Global Institutional Profiles Project, an initiative to create data-driven profiles of globally significant research institutions. Combined with citation metrics from Web of Knowledge™ and data provided by the institutions themselves, these results are delivered in the Institutional Profiles module of InCites™ to analyze productivity and benchmark against peers worldwide.

Building on an ongoing partnership with Times Higher Education, the Academic Reputation Survey will once again help inform the magazine’s influential World University Rankings and Reputation Ranking, and represents the largest single reputation survey used in the rankings to date. The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings, based on 2011 survey data, will be announced on Thursday, March 15.

Thomson Reuters will continue to analyze and release detailed results of the Academic Reputation Survey in the coming months. For more information and resources, visit http://science.thomsonreuters.com/globalprofilesproject .

For more information on the Institutional Profiles module of InCites, visit http://researchanalytics.thomsonreuters.com/incites/ .